Angry Editor

In its first twelve years the Saturday Review of Literature, under Editor Henry Seidel Canby, got its reputation as a conservative, conscientious literary journal. Its sober book reviews were coupled somewhat incongruously with the playfully erudite, wambling columns of Christopher Morley, its mildly suggestive personal ads with a weekly puzzle. The leading national book-review weekly, its eminence was made less impressive by the fact that it was the only one in the field. Although now & then the Saturday Review took a flyer in an extended literary appraisal, with articles by Critic John Chamberlain, H. L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, as a rule its 21,000 readers could expect: ten or twelve pages of reviews each week; a yes & no editorial about the book clubs, best sellers, proletarian novels, modern poetry or some current literary subject; Christopher Morley's The Bowling Green, in which the author ranged from his enthusiasm for Chaucer and Conan Doyle to accounts of his lecture tours; another column called Trade Winds, marked by the same weary whimsicality, in which a character called old Quercus, or young Quercus, or just young Q, commented on everything from misprints in best-sellers to catalogues of rare-book sales.

But in 1936 Editor Canby stepped down to the post of contributing editor. To his desk went aggressive, irascible, 39-year-old Bernard De Voto, who had been a lecturer at Harvard, editor of The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, a successful contributor to the Satevepost, Red Book, Collier's. Born in Ogden, Utah, the son of a Notre Dame mathematics teacher and a Mormon girl, Bernard De Voto entered the University of Utah at 17, helped organize a socialist society, left Utah in disgust when three faculty members were dismissed for unorthodox opinions. He went to Harvard, enlisted, was a lieutenant of infantry before he got back to Harvard to take his degree in 1920. He had taught for five years at Northwestern, married, published four novels that got high critical praise but few sales, a biographical study, Mark Twain's America.

Although critics might complain that they could not always tell what Editor De Voto was driving at, they had to admit that he more than made up for the amiable neutrality that had previously characterized the Saturday Review. Writing in a prose style so vehement it sometimes seemed apoplectic, Editor De Voto raged at U. S. intellectuals, accusing them en masse of "misrepresenting" the country. He passionately championed the cause of the Italian sociologist, Pareto. His critical haymakers included swings at Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Marx, reformers and believers in planned societies, Van Wyck Brooks, progressive education. With enthusiasms just as intense as his animosities, he called Robert Frost "the finest American poet, living or dead," raged at critics who did not agree. The back pages of the Saturday Review continued to be given over to literary double-crostic puzzles and the meandering pleasantries of Christopher Morley and old Q; but up front each week readers got the most violent U. S. criticism since Mencken (but not so sharply phrased as Mencken's), in reviews that seethed and sizzled.

Even Editor De Voto's gentler essays had a way of breaking abruptly with jets of angry prose that popped out like steam escaping from a safety valve. "What," asked perplexed Critic Edmund Wilson, "is Mr. De Voto's real grievance? This indignation at other people's errors which seems to prevent him from stating his own case, this continual boiling up about other people's wild statements which stimulates him to even wilder statements of his own. . . ." Critic Wilson Follett, who praised De Voto as a "gadfly to all manner of intellectual softies," hinted that he had outgrown his controversial gift, suggested it was time for him to quit, that he might now write "a superb work of the imagination on the scale of Anthony Adverse but incomparably better written and more soundly American."

Last month was a big one in Author De Voto's career. His publishers, Little, Brown, brought out a brief, uncritical biographical study by Garrett Mattingly.* The Saturday Review of Literature, confirming recent Manhattan literary gossip, announced his resignation "to give his time to writing and literary research." His successor: smiling, good-natured ex-managing editor of the Saturday Review, George Stevens.

* BERNARD DE VOTO: A PRELIMINARY APPRAISAL -- Little, Brown ($1).

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